


and the moon was hungry

by Rouge_Angle



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-19 02:40:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11888202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rouge_Angle/pseuds/Rouge_Angle
Summary: After breaking Obito, Madara remakes him to better suit his purposes. Expansion of chapter 606.





	and the moon was hungry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thefairyprincev (QueenOfThePolarBears)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfThePolarBears/gifts).



> For Morgan, who enables my obsession with these dorks.
> 
> So this is my attempt to get back into writing. It's not beta'd. I just wrote it, and I'm doing that bad thing where you post stuff hot off the press. Forgive me.

She’s cold.

_Rin is—_

Obito holds her, cheek pressed to her hair. Time doesn’t mean anything so he doesn’t notice how long he stays that way, kneeling in the blood of men he’s killed. Just holding her. (It’s a long time.)

Guruguru’s voice startles him, close as it is, after the silence. He’d flinch if he had the energy. “We should go,” the artificial man says softly, voice devoid of his usual cheer. “The others say Konoha shinobi are coming.” He waits, silence punctuated only by the pattering of rain.

“They should have been here earlier,” Obito says. His voice sounds off to his own ears, like he’s hearing himself speaking from a great distance. He doesn’t register the raindrops hitting his face. He looks down at the fingers curled tightly around Rin’s shoulders. Guruguru’s fingers, where his body is sheltering Obito’s own. He can feel through them, but they’re not really his fingers.

That’s okay though. She’s not really Rin. Not anymore. He lays her body on stone washed clean by the rain and steps through the blood, and Kakashi, as he leaves. He doesn’t look back.

-x-

The boy providence had seen fit to send his way had been an optimist with a kind, loving heart full of hopes. He’d been a fool.

The boy who returns to Madara is something else, drenched and reeking of slaughter. Obito talks with his one eye wide and burning with the vision they now share, the _tomoe_ of his Sharingan whirring unconsciously as if to reflect his restless zeal. There’s an almost unnatural stillness in the way he stands and his movements, though purposeful, seem sluggish.

Madara understands. It’s rough, losing your innocence.

Had he ever truly been innocent? It seems unlikely. But he’d once been a fool, just like Obito. He’d believed he could change this world for the better. He’s grown wise since then, of course, as Obito has only just begun to. Thanks to Zetsu he saw the whole thing, and what a thing of beauty it was. Obito’s broken heart has made him a vicious, merciless killer – more beast than human as he howled for blood to slake his sense of injustice until his voice was hoarse with it.  They’re already alike – it won’t be difficult to shape Obito into the perfect instrument to carry out his will.

As he invites the child ( _no longer a child_ ) closer, he’s satisfied that he has chosen well.

-x-

Obito calls his new technique Kamui, meaning Divine Authority. Madara had suggested it. “All Mangekyou techniques are named for divinity. Such is the power of our eyes.”

Kamui is a truly terrifying technique. Within the world of Madara’s genjutsu they parse the jutsu, figuring out its limits, which is easy enough. “It’s fitting, isn’t it?” Obito muses after one of their training sessions. “A fitting technique for a ghost.”

Madara smirks. “We’re both ghosts now.”

“Ghosts of the Uchiha.”

“Yes.” His hand settles on Obito’s chin and tilts his face up. The pad of his thumb runs up Obito’s cheek and under his empty eye socket. Obito represses a shudder. “Such a pity you only have the one.” He pauses, and looks down at his successor, thumb still pressing against his eye. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to get it back?”

This isn’t the first time Madara has asked. He thinks the other eye will have slightly different abilities, and obviously is itching to see what they are. If it wasn’t for the fact that Madara is old and can’t be the Saviour anymore and he needs Obito’s help, he might be slightly worried. Madara doesn’t have his proper eyes anymore, just one Sharingan. He might like to get his hands on Obito’s.

Kakashi has the other one. Obito tries not to think about Kakashi too much. He knows it wasn’t his fault, what happened. Not really. It’s the whole system – the whole _world_ that’s fucked up enough to let things like that happen—

(He knows this. And he tells himself this. But he also knows that he pleaded with his dying breath for Kakashi to protect Rin, and he betrayed him by _killing_ her. Hate rises in him like bile whenever he thinks about it. So he tries not to.)

Obito leans away from Madara’s touch. “I’m sure,” he says, as he’s said before. He always expects Madara to question him about it. As always, Madara surprises him by smiling as if he knows a secret Obito doesn’t and letting the matter drop.

-x-

There are other things Obito must learn if he’s to play his part, techniques beyond blazing infernos and seals and barriers. Beyond mastering elements other than fire, beyond taijutsu and even genjutsu. Though he teaches Obito all of these too, of course. Madara teaches Obito what he knows of medicine, science, geography, history. History is important.

Obito can’t become Madara and use his name if he doesn’t _know_ Madara.

“Senju Hashirama…he was a hypocrite, as most great men are,” he begins one scathing tirade. “Konoha was founded to end an era of unending bloodshed. I saw our mistake very quickly; we had done nothing to end wars. All we’d done was change their scale. Once it had been clans versus clans, now it would be village versus village. Children were raised so they could be put to the sword. I saw this, and I tried to tell him.” Madara snorts softly. “He never could see the forest for the trees. The trouble with Hashirama was that he was such an _optimist_ and he had this way of talking that made people listen to him. It made you want to believe in him, even if it went against everything you knew was true. He was—”

Obito interrupts him. “Did you love him?”

Madara stops short, hands frozen in mid-gesture, and glares. _Little shit._ “What?”

One of the annoying things about Obito; sometimes he’s becoming like him a bit _too_ well. The boy is smirking at him now and he rushes to explain himself almost gleefully. “You never shut up about him. Whenever you talk about your life you say ‘Hashirama’ so many times that if it was a drinking game people would drop like flies of liver poisoning every time they played.”

Madara hits him with an air of casualness, the back of his knuckles cracking him cleanly on the nose. Obito yelps and pinches his bleeding nose, seething. It’s Madara’s turn to smirk now; in his genjutsu _he_ is the one who decides whether or not Obito’s Kamui will be able to work or not. “Don’t interrupt me, brat.”

The brat curses at him, muttering about how it was only a question. It’s a times like these that Madara remembers Obito’s not ready. There’s still a lot of work that needs to go into this boy yet.

“Did you love Rin?” he asks, knowing the answer. Of course he did. He still does. Obito will always love Rin; he’s enshrined her in his mind, an inviolable virgin, forever young and innocent. His love for her never had the chance to grow, and will always be pure as a child’s. Madara’s own love is closer to Obito’s feelings for his other teammate, though they are of course, pale reflections of himself and Hashirama.

Obito stares at him, wiping blood from his face.

“I loved him,” Madara answers shortly, then tuts. “You’ve made me lose my thread of thought, where was I…?”

-x-

Konoha is truly cruel for leaving young ninja so unprepared for the world. Madara teaches him things that were only skimmed over or even completely neglected in the village. He forces Obito to learn dialects and perfect accents from all of the major countries and one or two minor ones. It turns out that impersonation and voices are something he’s surprisingly good at. He gets more petty amusement than he should out of learning to impersonate Madara’s own voice. It’s dead on, if he does say so himself.

“You’d sound more convincing if your voice didn’t keep going squeaky every five minutes,” Madara informs him nastily.

It’s true; Obito’s grown physically in his time under Madara’s wing. He’s shot up in height, and is optimistic he’ll get taller. His hair is wilder and shaggier than ever, much like his mentor’s own. His voice has deepened too.

There are other practical parts of his education which Madara assures aren’t neglected.

“You are not a whore, and have no need to use your body in this way. Such tactics are for the weak, and only morons fall for them.” He eyes Obito as if trying to decide whether he’s a moron or not. “But in case they’re ever used against you…”

Obito’s not a child. He knows about sex. There was sex education at the Academy. These days it’s the furthest thing possible from his mind.

He thinks Madara’s excruciatingly in-depth lecture on the topic would’ve left him deeply traumatised, had he been anyone else.

-x-

Every day, seeing Obito becomes more and more like gazing into a mirror. Madara continues to chip away at who Obito was. He shows him detailed visions of battlefields, walking him through their horrors and leading him ever deeper in his knowledge of Hell.

“Most who knew me are dead now, but you must be convincing.” He shows Obito flashes from his own life.

Izuna lay dying, wasting away before his eyes. He’d been helpless. They watch him cough blood onto the sheets, his past self mopping sweat from his brow.

“He was my brother,” Madara explains. “And they later said I had murdered him. They tried to claim that I _ripped his eyes out_ for my own gain when he left them to me and they knew it.” His voice is a hiss, decades old resentment that refuses to die bubbling to the surface. “It was one of the ways they justified turning their backs on me.”  He folds his arms and watches Izuna die, as he has many times before in the privacy of his own mind. “I would never have hurt my little brother. But I blamed myself.”

Obito understands. For the briefest of moments he lays his fingers over the back of his teacher’s hand and pats it, before withdrawing his arm into his own sleeve. Helplessness and guilt are things he understands too well.

Madara made sure of it.

-x-

Madara makes him learn how to remove an eye without damaging it. He shows Obito the slow, careful procedure of delicate chakra feelers and the surgical precision of a scalpel’s edge, easing the prize cleanly into a jar of formaldehyde. He also shows him the other way. In the blank canvas of the genjutsu, Madara rips out countless eyeballs in the name of Obito’s education. The victims thrash and struggle and scream in a way that’s all too real as Madara hooks his fingers and swoops on illusory Sharingan with the sudden violence of a hawk snatching up its prey.

“Obviously it’s easier if they’re dead,” he says, and Obito is left feeling a chill as he meets the man’s lone Sharingan eye. He’d called it a _spare_. 

He insists Obito practice the grisly skill himself, over and over and over again, until he can pull it off perfectly every time. Obito’s not quite there yet and Madara gives him a look of barely disguised aggravation as he prises open Obito’s bloody fingers and regards the mess on his palm.  

“Don’t give me that look,” Obito huffs, trying to ignore the way eyeball goo is trickling over his hand like uncooked egg. There had been a time when he wanted nothing more to impress his teacher. Now Obito knows that Minato had never deserved to be idolized. All the Yellow Flash is good for is not being there when people actually need him. It’s a trait that Obito intends to make sure comes back and bites him.

Madara is a better teacher by far. Obito doesn’t care about impressing him. Which is just as well, because the way the way Madara is looking at him right now makes it very clear that he’s not impressed. He pinches the dangling optic nerve and places it back on Obito’s hand, coiled like a tail around the rest. “There’s a knack to it, like anything else. Imagine holding a baby bird; you can’t let it escape, but you mustn’t crush it.” He prods the burst eyeball. “You know what you did wrong. Try again.”

Since Madara won’t break the immersion of his genjutsu to vanish away the mess, Obito shakes his hand vigorously and then wipes it on his pants. He doesn’t need Madara’s approval. But he does need his help, if things are ever going to be made right again. And as of right now, the two go hand in hand. 

-x-

Dying is more painful than he remembers. Every breath feels like blades scraping at his insides. Madara screws up his face and pants for breath, his vision blurring. “Go,” he wheezes. “Until I revive…you are…Madara.”

-x-

Madara looks down at the corpse of his predecessor and nods respectfully. He owes him much. The Sharingan in the old man’s empty socket is a strip of red beneath his eyelid. The boy who was once Obito plucks it out.

It’s his, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment if you enjoyed! I don't get paid for this and your validation makes me ridiculously happy. No pressure though.


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